Origins (1984)

Drug Wars traces back to John E. Dell, who wrote the original in 1984 for DOS computers. It was written in BASIC and deceptively simple: you played a dealer in New York City, buying and selling across the boroughs while dodging the police and paying off a loan shark.

There were no graphics beyond text. It didn’t matter. The loop — buy low in one place, travel, sell high in another — tapped straight into basic economics, wrapped in a forbidden theme that made it irresistible in the early days of personal computers.

It spread as shareware over bulletin board systems and swapped floppy disks. At well under 50 kilobytes it was easy to copy, and it moved through college campuses and offices the way a rumor does.

How it played

The original gave you 30 days. Each turn was a day, and each day you could:

  • Buy at the day’s prices — cocaine, heroin, acid, weed, speed and ludes
  • Travel between the Bronx, the Ghetto, Central Park, Manhattan, Coney Island and Brooklyn
  • Sell somewhere the price was better
  • Bank your cash where muggers couldn’t reach it
  • Pay down the loan shark, whose interest compounded every day

Random events kept it tense. Police could take your stash or arrest you, prices could spike or crash, and a mugging could wipe out your pocket money. The loan shark was the clock: compounding interest meant you had to make money fast or things got ugly.

The TI-83 years

In the late 1990s and early 2000s the game found a second life on Texas Instruments graphing calculators, especially the TI-83 and TI-83 Plus. Students passed it between calculators over link cables and played it in the back of math class.

For a whole generation the calculator version — usually called “Drugwars” or “DrugWarz” — was the game. A 96×64 monochrome screen and a keypad forced it down to its essentials, and somehow that made it even better.

Ports and variations

Few games have been ported as often. Some notable versions:

  • Dope Wars — the best-known PC clone, by Ben Webb, for Unix/Linux and later Windows
  • Dopewars for Palm OS — one of the most-downloaded Palm Pilot games
  • Drug Lord — an expanded take with extra systems
  • Countless phone versions on iOS and Android
  • Browser versions, starting with JavaScript ports in the early 2000s

Each added something — more drugs, more cities, weapons, property, deeper economies — but the buy-low-sell-high loop stayed sacred.

Why it stuck

Drug Wars came long before the arguments about “controversial games” that later followed titles like Grand Theft Auto. Being plain text seems to have kept it under the radar.

It also quietly taught a lot of people about supply and demand, arbitrage, risk, compound interest and not keeping all your money in one place. Plenty of players say it was their first real lesson in any of that.

Its loop lives on in games that have nothing to do with drugs — space trading in Elite Dangerous and EVE Online, merchant runs in countless RPGs. Drug Wars showed that a simple market could be endlessly replayable.

Drug Warz AI: a modern take

Drug Warz AI keeps the 1984 heart — you still start broke and in debt to a loan shark — and builds outward:

  • 19 cities across the US, Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia, each with prices it remembers
  • 12 drugs with purity that changes what you get paid
  • Around 40 story events — choices with visible odds, some of which come back days later
  • Plugs and territory: ally with eight suppliers, buy them out or take their city, become Kingpin
  • A lender ladder that climbs with your net worth, from a neighborhood shark to a cartel boss richer than you
  • Fights you can read, with win odds, cover, bribes and hired security
  • A crew that sells while you travel — and might run with the money

It’s built with no framework: plain TypeScript, CSS and the browser’s own canvas and audio. Every balance change is tested against thousands of simulated games. Maximum game, minimum bloat — the way the original was.